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Abstract

Dormancy is a general microbial life-history trait that leads to the emergence of seed banks across diverse ecosystems. While the primary forces driving seed banks include macroscale factors like resource supply, the importance of microscale factors such as individual encounters with resource molecules are often overlooked. Here, we used >10,000 individual based models (IBMs) to simulate energetic, physiological, and ecological processes across combinations of resource-, spatial-, and trophic-complexity. We found that increasing rates of encounter of individual organisms with resource molecules led to greater abundance, greater productivity, and larger seed banks. We also found that the chemical complexity of resource molecules reduced encounter rates, which led to increased variability in the size of seed banks. Encounter-driven ‘boom and bust’ dynamics also caused resource-rich environments to simultaneously host large seed banks and serve as hotbeds of microbial activity. In conclusion, microscale phenomena appear to be essential for understanding the emergence of seed banks, the energetic basis of microbial life history trade-offs, and variation in the abundance and activity of microbial communities.

Movie showing chemotaxis of bacteria towards resource particles

Additional Information

Competing Interests

Author Contributions

Kenneth J Locey conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Melany C Fisk conceived and designed the experiments, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Jay T Lennon conceived and designed the experiments, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Data Deposition

The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

GitHub repository: https://github.com/LennonLab/Micro-Encounter

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation Dimensions of Biodiversity Grant 1442246 and US Army Research Office Grant W911NF-14-1-0411. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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